Two Degrees Closer to Hell Reviewed By James Broderick, Ph.D of Bookpleasures.com

James Broderick Ph.D

Reviewer James
Broderick, Ph.D: James is an associate professor of English and journalism at
New Jersey City University. A former newspaper reporter and editor,
he is the author of six non-fiction books, and the novel Stalked. His
latest book is Greatness Thrust Upon Them, a collection of interviews
with Shakespearean actors across America. Follow Here To Listen To An Interview With James Broderick.

David Fingerman, author of
Two Degrees Closer to Hell, is a man a wee bit out of time. Well,
actually about 75 years.

In the “golden age” of
pulp fiction, when publications like Astounding Science Fiction and
Thrilling Wonder Stories captured the imaginations of post-Depression
America, Fingerman would have found a home (and likely a steady
income). The kind of horror story he writes – bare-bones
exposition, surreal settings, minimal dialogue, plot-driven
mis-directions, and endings that twist like a whirling dervish –
formed the spine of the corpus of speculative fiction that fueled the
imaginations of writers like Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Robert
Silverberg.

That era has been
preserved in the over-worn phrase “pulp fiction” – a descriptor
that nonetheless captures nicely both the figurative and the literal
style of those magazines. Printed on cheap, “pulpy” paper –
though usually containing elaborately drawn, garishly colorful cover
illustrations – these magazines contained outlandish tales
featuring mysterious characters, exotic settings, and bizarre,
unexpected endings. The genres that thrived the most in the pulp
fiction era were those that offered the greatest escape from the
still-smarting world of mundane economic struggle: science fiction
and horror. And the majority of the writers of those stories worked
fast and cheap, cranking out weekly horrors for an audience eager to
be frightened by other-worldly encroachments.

Though still extant into
the 1950s, the majority of the pulps began losing steam – and
readers – when the real-life horrors of World War II supplanted the
imagined horrors of the often-pseudonymous writing staffs of these
publications. What arose was a horror literature more sophisticated,
more psychological, and more “literary,” with many of the new
wave of speculative fiction writers trained in university writing
programs, some having returned from the theatre of war with a new
understanding of what actually constituted “horror.”

Such a timeline suggests
that the pulp fiction style was somehow lesser, or inadequate, but
that’s too reductive and simplistic an interpretation. Many of
those stories still hold up well today – lots of them are great fun
to read. The writers of those stories didn’t see themselves as a
corps d’belles-lettres. They wrote to entertain, to surprise, to
give a quick fright.

Fingerman
strikes me as that kind of writer. Eschewing the decorative prose of
a Peter Straub, the rhetorical intensity of a Stephen King, or the
poignancy of a Ray Bradbury, Fingerman is instead all about the
story. Most of the entries in Two Degrees Closer to Hell are brief –
think half-hour “Twilight Zone” episodes. He’s a very efficient
writer, establishing his eerie worlds quickly. It’s no indictment
of his style to say his prose is workmanlike. The focus is on the
plot -- and the dark, unpredictable twists that await readers at the
end of his stories, which vary wildly in time, place, and situation
(though a certain sameness of narrative voice does weigh down the
collection just a bit). In our MFA-besotted world of “finely-wrought”
stories, groaning under the weight of literary significance, there’s
definitely a place for writers like Fingerman. He’s something of a
literary throwback, and for readers who enjoy a campfire tale or
power-outage scare session, Fingerman’s brisk-moving story-telling
will provide plenty of delights until the lights come back on, and
the sheen of modern literature blinds us with its calculated
brilliance.